Quotes About Interpretation

There'll be differences of opinion in just about every intelligence analysis that you make.

The thought came to me that all one loves in art becomes beautiful. Beauty is nothing but the expression of the fact that something is being loved. Only thus could she be defined.

Hardly anyone still reads nowadays. People make use of the writer only in order to work off their own excess energy on him in a perverse manner, in the form of agreement or disagreement.

Everyone is sure they know what fascism is.

This landmark book shines new light on things we thought we understood. —Charles Swencionis

Our visual system does not simply reflect external reality but rather actively constructs it.

Conviction, Nietzsche said, is a greater enemy of truth than lies.)

Trying to describe something musical is like dancing to architecture, it's really difficult.

The poem... is a little myth of man's capacity of making life meaningful. And in the end, the poem is not a thing we see — it is, rather, a light by which we may see — and what we see is life.

The best anthology is the one each reader compiles, personally, according to his or her judgment, pleasure and awe." ~ Robert Pinsky, Singing School, 2013

Teorin om arv via miljö ger oss en ny modell för hur vi ska se på erfarenheter; vi varseblir, tolkar, väljer, modifierar och skapar aktivt erfarenheter som korrelerar med våra genetiska anlag.

A pair of stockings is no less suitable o make a painting of than wood,nails,turpentine,oil,and fabric.

I didn't want painting to be simply an act of emphasizing one color to do something to another color, like using red to intensify green, because that would imply some subordination of red. I didn't want color to serve me.

The last hour would not come unless the Muslims will fight against the Jews and the Muslims would kill them until the Jews would hide themselves behind a stone or a tree and a stone or a tree would say: Muslim, or the servant of Allah, there is a Jew behind me; come and kill him; but the tree Gharqad would not say, for it is the tree of the Jews.

[H]istorians have powerful imaginations, which are essential and dangerous.

Expert in examining entrails of sacrificed animals, but also in interpreting prodigies and lightning, the haruspices were for a long time the custodians of an Etruscan science resorted to only in exceptional circumstances. They formed an official college of sixty members only from the time of the emperor Claudius (41-54), who was, as we know, passionately interested in Etruscology.

Bateson (1972) describes the prepsychotic child as growing up "unskilled in determining what people really mean and unskilled in expressing what he really means, which is essential for normal relationships." He suggests that this situation occurs in normal relationships as well. When a person is caught in a double-bind situation, he will respond defensively in a manner similar to the schizophrenic, though less intensely.

elitist reading of Scripture is not designed to foster saving faith in the crucified and risen Jesus but frequently assumes the repugnancy of the gospel diagnosis of the human condition and its remedy.

feelings are "true" if the judgments they encode are accurate

During the Crusades, when Christians were in the mood to slaughter infidels, they were very cognizant of God's sanctioning faith-based mass murder in parts of the Bible. During the Cold War, when the United States was part of an international multifaith alliance that included Muslim and Buddhist nations, this motif was played down; whole generations of American Christians were weaned on a misleadingly sunny selection of Bible stories.

Ambiguity, selective retention, and misleading paraphrasal combine to give believers great influence on the meaning of their religion. But, for raw semantic power, none of these tools rivals the deft deployment of metaphor and allegory. In a single stroke, this can obliterate a text's literal meaning and replace it with something radically different.

that the stories we tell about things, and thus the beliefs we have about their history and their nature, shape our experience of them, and thus our sense of their essence.

To perceive emptiness is to perceive raw sensory data without doing what we're naturally inclined to do: build a theory about what is at the heart of the data and then encapsulate that theory in a sense of essence.

La percepción es un proceso activo que constantemente está construyendo modelos del mundo. Esa es una de las razones por las que cada persona ve cosas diferentes en los manchones abstractos de tinta utilizados en las pruebas de Rorschach: nuestra mente trata de convertir incluso los patrones más ambiguos en algo que tenga sentido. Nos gusta tener una historia sobre lo que son y lo que significan las cosas.